Development of a Common Design Framework for Commercial and Military CGF Applications Ben Lubetsky

摘要

MAK Technologies has a number of development efforts underway involving Computer Generated Forces, in both commercial and military simulation. The commercial efforts include Spearhead II, a multiplayer tank simulation game, and MEU 2000, a 3-D tactical decision-making training game for the US Marines. In Spearhead II, CGF provides opposing forces, as well as rounds out the composition of platoons. In MEU 2000, CGF provides the company, battalion, or Marine Expeditionary Unit commanded by the player. On the military simulation side, MAK is developing an HLA Battlemaster, in which an operator can create, task, and simulate a wide variety of CGF entities. The functional and technical requirements for CGF are quite similar for these gaming and military simulation applications. While the requirements for gaming and military simulation do not always intersect (e.g. playability and fun, versus realism), many key technical issues apply to both: aggregation, tasking and behaviors, composability, and scalability. These common technical requirements, coupled with the fact that the network and terrain components are already shared services, has led to the development of a common design framework and code base for CGF. This will lead to the creation of a CGF developer's toolkit product. This paper will discuss the development of the common CGF framework, describing key design issues and trade-offs. The critical functional or technical requirements of the various projects will be identified, illustrating how the degree of similarity (or lack thereof), is influencing influenced the design.